Most Transparent Administration Evah is Riddled with Secret Email Addresses

Maybe along with fundamentally transforming America, Barack Obama also fundamentally transformed the English language. He rode into power promising “transparency,” but has delivered a busload of unaccountable policy czars and, it turns out, a widespread use of secret email accounts atop several government agencies.

Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

The AP asked for the addresses following last year’s disclosures that the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged – but often happens anyway – due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.

The EPA awarded certificates naming Jackson/Windsor a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Jackson, under her secret alias, was also awarded certificates for completing training modules on email records management.

Jackson set up a secret email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner first discovered it in November.

Republicans and government watchdog groups say Jackson may have skirted federal record laws by using the alias, but the EPA claims the secret email address was a common practice—and a necessary one, given the millions of emails that flooded Jackson’s public inbox every year.

Horner, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank, obtained the certificates via a Freedom of Information Act request.

“I like my fake employees to be of the highest ethical standards and fully up to date on the law and ethics of federal recordkeeping,” Horner told the Washington Free Beacon. “At least someone there is.”

“Windsor” even conducted two-way conversations with people outside the EPA, and dodged phone calls when those people thought he was a real person. So Jackson was lying to who knows how many people. The agency has not explained how a non-existent employee could be certified to have taken mandatory courses. Lisa Jackson stepped down amid her scandal in January 2013, but certainly landed on her feet: Apple hired her last week. Do ethics matter at Apple?

The AP’s reporting indicates that the Obama government may be full of alias emails and that there may be even more “Richard Windsors” out there. Government agencies may also be using Jackson’s trick of deploying the fake personnas and email accounts to coordinate with leftist special interest groups outside government, and away from public scrutiny.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

I'm not sure how things work at EPA, but around here it would be very difficult for anyone to simply "create" a fake .gov email account. It would take the cooperation of several different groups to make that happen. It would also leave a substantial paper trail.

Unless, of course, the bigshot in question threw his or her weight around and "persuaded" someone to do it off the record. In any bureaucracy it's possible to find people who think that orders to violate the rules constitute permission to violate the rules, that if the boss must have a good reason for violating the rules, that saying No to the boss is a bad idea, that doing little favors for people is just part of the job, etc.

That might be how this happened. It's probably one reason the IRS business happened, too.

After reading the AP article, it's apparent that their use of the word "secret" is inappropriate.

All they're saying - and making a big deal of - is that some government managers have more than one email address. Actually, a lot of government workers have multiple email addresses, some of which are public and some of which are not. Whether someone has more than one address usually depends on the requirements of their job.

For instance, I might have one .gov address for general correspondence ("joe.smith@agency.gov&quot;) and another for my role as a network administrator ("net_admin@agency.gov&quot;). The public might know about the first one - my wife can send emails to it. The other might only be known to people within the agency. It's not literally "secret" - it's just that we don't publicize it because the public doesn't have any business with me as the agency network administrator.

Having multiple email addresses isn't the issue. The issue is whether "alternate" email addresses are used to bypass